Over-Exposed (Columbia,. 1956)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, September 12) my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing movie from Columbia in 1956: Over-Exposed (that’s how the official credits spell the title), directed by Lewis Seiler from a committee-written script: Richard Sale and Mary Loos (then husband and wife, and a writing team Raymond Chandler had some kind words about), “original” story; and James Gunn and Gil Orlovitz, screenplay. The film opens in a police station where a sleazy bar has just been raided by the police. Our heroine, Lily Krenshka (Cleo Moore), had just started work there the night before and had had no idea it was a clip joint. She’s ordered by an officious cop to leave town, but she’s taken in by Max West (Raymond Greenleaf), a once prestigious photographer who burned out his career with alcohol. Max offers her a job as a swimsuit model after reassuring her he’s not interested in her That Way, and eventually he teaches her the basics of photography, including the ins and outs of portrait lighting as well as retouching and colorization (it was actually fairly common in those days for professional photographers to hand-paint their pictures with watercolors to give the illusion of color) to make the middle-aged dowagers he’s hired to photograph look convincingly younger. When she’s learned enough about photography to be capable of a career at it, she moves to New York City, changes her name to “Lila Crane” at West’s suggestion (by coincidence “Lila Crane” is also the name of Vera Miles’s character in the original 1960 Psycho), and tries for a job at the Allied Press Service. As she’s coming out of their offices she literally bumps into one of their star reporters, Russell Bassett (a young Richard Crenna). As he helps pick up the photos from her portfolio he tells her to find a big news story somewhere and photograph it.

The big news story duly arrives in the form of an enormous fire (obviously filled in from stock footage of a real one) at which Lila takes spectacular photos even at the risk of her own life. Russell rescues her just in time from a falling wall in the burning building. Instead of taking a low-paying job at Allied, Lila gets hired by Les Bauer (a young and uncredited Jack Albertson) to photograph the guests at his club. She’s also accosted by an unscrupulous gossip columnist, Roy Carver (James O’Rear), to sell him copies of any pictures she takes that catch celebrities or prominent people in compromising positions. He offers her $5 for any such photo but she bids him up to $10. Ultimately she wangles a job at a more prestigious club, Coco’s, ostensibly owned and managed by Coco Fields (played as a Clifton Webb-style screaming queen by Donald Randolph) but really run by a gangster. (One wonders if the writers were thinking of the Stork Club, ostensibly run by Sherman Billingsley but actually owned by the Mafia.) She rises in prominence not only as a nightclub photographer but also as an advertising and fashion photographer, and even gets an interview with a prestigious TV show in which the host ostensibly calls someone on the telephone for a random interview but really the whole thing is set up well in advance. (I suspect the writers were thinking of Edward R. Murrow’s Person to Person here, or maybe Ralph Edwards’s This Is Your Life.) There’s a major mistake in that the call letters for the station broadcasting the interview are KXIW, which would indicate a West Coast or Midwest location (all East Coast stations have call letters beginning with W).

Russell Bassett continues to date her and one weekend, when they’re on vacation together in Maine, he proposes to her and asks her to join him in both a personal and professional partnership. He suggests the two of them go to Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the world’s other hot spots, with him reporting on the events there and her photographing them. She turns him down because she’s worked too hard for what she’s achieved, but fate intervenes. Mrs. Payton Grange (Isobel Elsom), an old friend and photographic client of Max West’s in the small town where all this started, shows up at Coco’s and dances a mambo with a much younger partner. Then she suddenly has a heart attack and dies in the middle of the dance floor. Lila takes a picture of it but then thinks better of it and tears up the print – only her slimeball columnist partner Roy Carver steals the negative out of her darkroom and ultimately sells the photo to a magazine called Sensational (read: the real-life Confidential, a 1950’s scandal sheet). The scandal caused by the publication of Lila’s “death photo” of Mrs. Grange causes her entire career to evaporate (something that really dates this movie: today not only would a photo like that be considered fair game, it would be all over the Internet in no time, the way the video of Right-wing activist Charlie Kirk getting shot at Utah Valley College “went viral” and appeared all over the Net with no apparent qualms from anyone involved).

She tries to salvage her career by fishing out of her discard pile a photo she accidentally took of the gangster who actually ran Coco’s, which would have blown his alibi for a killing near the club. Alas, the gangster and two of his henchmen kidnap Lila and torture her to get the information on where she’s hidden the photo. Russell crashes her studio and finds one of the gangsters there, and in the film’s most spectacular scene he throws a tray of developing fluid in the gangster’s face, at least temporarily blinding him. Then, despite the three-against-one odds, Russell goes to where Lila is being held and rescues her. Ultimately she accepts Russell’s marriage proposal even though it doesn’t entail anything more than being a housewife and ultimately mother to his kids. While Over-Exposed’s ending is the sort of sexism typical of its time – the ambitious career woman who reached for financial and emotional independence has to be taken down several pegs and publicly humiliated for defying the so-called “natural order” of male dominance – there’s one thing about this movie that holds up very well today. It’s Cleo Moore’s attitude; throughout the movie she’s understandably wary of men who offer to “help” her and turning them down pretty regularly for fear they have something else in mind other than just being “nice” to her.

Cleo Moore had a frustrating career in that it only lasted nine years – she was spotted by a talent scout at RKO and her first film was Congo Bill (1948), in which she played a minor role. She alternated between tiny parts in important films like On Dangerous Ground (1951) and leads in “B” features like this one. Her imdb.com biographer, Denny Jackson, laments, “To her legions of fans, she remains their favorite sex symbol of the 1950’s, and others languish knowing that her talent could have sent her to loftier heights instead of being wasted in minor roles in substandard ‘B’ films.” After just one more feature film and one TV appearance after Over-Exposed, she retired to marry real-estate tycoon Herbert Heftier in 1957 and stayed with him until her death in 1973 at the age of just 48. I suspect what kept her from the brass ring of stardom was Moore’s attitude: fiercely independent and unwilling to play the double game of sexuality and innocence that made Marilyn Monroe a star. In Over-Exposed she plays a character who knows exactly what the men in her life want from her – either money, sex, or both – and her fierce independence probably put off 1950’s movie audiences even though it also makes her seem “modern” today!